Abstract
Previous research has shown that lay people can accurately assess male sexual orientation based on limited information, such as face, voice, or behavioral display. Gender-atypical traits are thought to serve as cues to sexual orientation. We investigated the presumed mechanisms of sexual orientation attribution using a standardized set of facial and vocal stimuli of Czech men. Both types of stimuli were rated for sexual orientation and masculinity-femininity by non-student heterosexual women and homosexual men. Our data showed that by evaluating vocal stimuli both women and homosexual men can judge sexual orientation of the target men in agreement with their self-reported sexual orientation. Nevertheless, only homosexual men accurately attributed sexual orientation of the two groups from facial images. Interestingly, facial images of homosexual targets were rated as more masculine than heterosexual targets. This indicates that attributions of sexual orientation are affected by stereotyped association between femininity and male homosexuality; however, reliance on such cues can lead to frequent misjudgments as was the case with the female raters. Although our study is based on a community sample recruited in a non-English speaking country, the results are generally consistent with the previous research and thus corroborate the validity of sexual orientation attributions.
Highlights
Within European and American cultures, there is a widespread belief that men’s sexual orientation can be accurately judged solely on the basis of limited information, such as appearance, voice, or nonverbal behavior [1]
This study builds upon previous research that showed perceived sexual orientation, based on voice stimuli, correlated significantly with self-reported sexual orientation [4,5,6,24]
The current findings show that attributions of sexual orientation are congruent with self-reports and that they appear in the Czech language, and are not limited to English
Summary
Within European and American cultures, there is a widespread belief that men’s sexual orientation can be accurately judged solely on the basis of limited information, such as appearance, voice, or nonverbal behavior [1]. A body of research (reviewed by Tskhay and Rule [3]) has shown that sexual orientation, and other perceptually ambiguous characteristics, such as political orientation, can be identified above a chance level, they do not show any obvious markers of belonging to the given social group. This supposedly automatic categorization of unknown individuals based on the first impression appears to be one of the most important mechanisms allowing people to quickly and effectively classify the social world. Other research reported that sexual orientation can be estimated from still photographs of the entire clothed figure [6,7,10]
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